It could be worse

I said that I find editing kind of fun, but I imagine that is rare and maybe even weird. I certainly have that impression based on how little people do it on their own. I explained in that post what I like about it - lots of little, moderately creative challenges. Well, this post is about a part of my job that I don't like.

When I told this story on another blog, they said that the situation, "responsibility without authority", sounded like the very definition of stress. On another project (the one mentioned here, not that it matters), for a while my main responsibility was organizing public feedback. It was a complete mess.

First of all, there was a lot of redundancy in public comments. People often would submit comments by both e-mail and fax or mail and fax or e-mail and mail, presumably to make sure they got there, despite clear requests not to. In addition, a lot of comments had two ID numbers. This was partly because of multiple submissions, and partly because of a change in the project partway through, and I think it might also have been because of a change in how my agency handled comments around the same time. Or maybe the federal government in general, I don't know. (I suppose I'm lucky they didn't all get four ID numbers, then.) The thing is, we couldn't just throw them all in there, because we need to be able to say specifically how many people objected to the rulemaking, how many people claimed they personally would be impacted by it, whether four or just two people said they did a study and got different numbers than our own engineers, etc. In addition, the three(ish) subject matter experts (SMEs) had to sort through the comments. They needed to refer to comments on Topic 1 in the Topic 1 section of the preamble, comments on Topic 2 in the Topic 2 section of the preamble, and so on.

If we were talking about a dozen public submissions, this would be no problem, but we're talking about more than 60 comments (maybe more than 200, depending on what you're counting), and at one point there was about 50 topics. It was my job to winnow out duplicate comments and sort quotes by topic. After the SMEs had each read over printouts of the comments and marked excerpts on them, it was my job to enter all this into a database. So I was sorting printouts of 60-200 things marked up by three different people, who didn't always agree with each other.

Many errors were inevitable. Because of the "low on the totem pole" thing, and pressures on the group as a whole like deadlines, I had little to no say about how to do it. For just one example, it would have been much easier for me and I'm pretty sure it would have objectively made more sense if they had given me one set of comments marked up by everyone, but that's not how it worked out. I had a job, but had no say in how to do it other than begging. Responsibility without authority. Throw in a deadline, and all this happening when I was still relatively new to the job, and it was miserable.

I bring all this up partly to contrast with my current work, which for all my apparent complaining really is relatively fun and straightforward. I also bring it up because it's what some people on the team are dealing with in their own ways. It's not sorting public feedback, but again, H. is the person on the project team I feel most sorry for. She is the boss of the team, theoretically. But she can't get rid of anyone or get anyone new. She can call meetings, but her authority over peoples' time is limited to asking politely. Her immediate supervisor is the guy who cared the most about the deadline, but neither of them can just tell everyone else to do it their way.